suggestions for parents - staying patient with your teens

1. suggestions for parents: staying patient with your teens Patience is one of the most important skills to learn as a parent, yet one of the most difficult ones to implement. How many times have you wanted to grab your teen and shake them, or just say “Because I said so” rather than dealing with the issue at hand with composure? As a parent, we can think of patience as the ability to deal with difficult situations or problems in a calm and rational manner. Feelings may still be a part of the thought processes and the discussion at hand, but they’re able to be brought to the table in a level-headed manner. Patience also involves a level of compassion and love for self. Science shows us how important patience is to teen and adolescent development. A 2023 study showed that children who had parents who emphasized patience had higher levels of motivation and greater self-esteem than children who did not. Studies have also shown that when parents use patience, it is a modeled behavior for children, in turn making them calm and patient.. It has also been proven that being patient with our children, leads to us being more patient with ourselves. Being patient with ourselves is proven to lead to higher self-esteem, greater motivation, and improved mood.

2. Here are five things you can try to make sure you’re staying patient with your teen: Understand what makes you lose your patience. Take note of times when you feel like you’ve been quick to anger, or had a difficult time staying level-headed. If you can understand when these situations occur, you may be able to avoid them in the future. You can try de-escalating before you lose your patience, letting your teen know that you’re struggling to stay patient, or removing yourself from the situation. Understand why you lose your patience. If you’ve identified what makes you lose your patience, you can also understand why those things make you struggle to stay calm and rational. Is there a theme to all of the things you’ve identified? Identifying why those things make you lose your patience allows you to communicate that to your teen. Teenagers are smart - help them help you. Ensure there is open communication. Your teen may struggle to stay patient too. Create open communication in your home. Allow for space for your teen to tell you when they’re having a hard time staying patient. If they know they can share things with you, and you’ll be patient and calm in the face of whatever they share, they’re more likely to maintain a level of openness with you. Practice and plan for de-escalation. We will all have moments where despite our best efforts, we do lose our patience, fail to stay calm, or struggle to communicate rationally. Make a plan for when those moments happen. Find a strategy that works for you when you do lose your patience, and see if you can find one that works for your teen as well. Both of you need to be calm and reset in order to return to the original problem in a productive way. Turn that patience on yourself. Being patient with yourself leads to greater patience with your child. You will never be perfect as a parent, there is nothing called “Perfect”. You will not always have a kind, caring, response to your teen. You will never be able to keep the house conflict-free. Be patient with yourself. Be kind to yourself. Take a few moments. Patience can be a difficult practice. Be patient with yourself as you grow, but ensure you’re committed to learning. If you’re interested in learning more about parenting and patience, visit GenZ&U! Boca, D. D., Flinn, C., Verriest, E., & Wiswall, M. (2023, September 14). Parenting with patience: Parental incentives SSRN. https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=4568760 and child development.

3. The 10). https://warren.cce.cornell.edu/family-community/parent-pages/just-for-parents/the-power- of-patience power of patience. Cornell Cooperative Extension. (2015a, August Young, T., Rohwer, A., van Schalkwyk, S., Volmink, J., & Clarke, M. (2015). Patience, persistence and pragmatism: experiences and lessons learnt from the implementation of clinically integrated teaching and learning of evidence-based health care - a qualitative study. PloS one, 10(6), e0131121. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0131121 Coping with Burnout: Student Edition Many of us seek higher education late in life. Being a student is absolutely exhausting. Between school, your personal life, and a job, your time is stretched thin, and taking care of yourself often becomes the last priority. This leads to burnout. But what is burnout, and how do you address it? Burnout is an individual’s response to chronic stress. It develops progressively, and is acute or chronic. It tends to manifest both physically and psychologically, with people experiencing everything from insomnia, weight loss/ gain, and chronic fatigue, to irritability, a loss of joy in day-to-day life (called anhedonia), and decreased emotionality. Burnout impacts all areas of life. It creates issues in professional environments, because of its effects on your productivity and work attitude. It can also interfere with your personal life by influencing your interpersonal intersections, your overall ability to be a good friend/partner/parent/child, or your general attitude toward those around you. Among students in the USA, ⅓ report feeling burnt out, and 4 in 5 will experience burnout at some point in their academic career. Knowing this, and that it can cause emotional disconnect, decreased productivity, and increased physical health issues, how do you cope with it? Research shows that the most effective ways to cope with burnout are emotional venting and behavioral disengagement. Emotional venting could be anything from talking with friends and family about how you’re feeling, to joining support groups or online chats, to formally seeking therapy. Emotional venting allows you to release some of the physical and psychological stress builds in the body, without adding the strain of problem-solving. Problem-solving is important to coping with burnout as well - but that comes later, in the recovery period when some of your burnout symptoms begin to reduce. Behavioral disengagement is what it sounds like disengaging

4. with the behaviors that have led to your burnout. When you have academic obligations this can be tough; however, it’s possible to find little ways to reduce stress. Sleep in on the weekends. Skip a week of clubs or extra circulars. Set aside time each day to take breaks, and when you have formal time off from school, do not engage with school during that time. Burnout is rough to experience, but there are ways to cope. Give yourself grace, space, and time to recover. If you’d like to learn more about burnout, its effects, and ways to cope, come over to GenZ&U. Edú-Valsania, S., Laguía, A., & Moriano, J. A. (2022). Burnout: A Review of Theory and Measurement. International journal of environmental research and public health, 19(3), 1780. https://doi.org/10.3390/ijerph19031780 Montero-Marin J, Prado-Abril J, Piva Demarzo MM, Gascon S, García-Campayo J (2014) Coping with Stress and Types of Burnout: Explanatory Power of Different Coping Strategies. PLOS ONE 9(2): e89090. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0089090